Haygoodness

I’m an independent scholar, not a “wayward academic”

This weekend, an article appeared in the Boston Globe about something I’m involved in, the Ronin Institute for independent scholarship. I’m quoted in the article, which is titled “Home for wayward academics.”

The article isn’t without merit, but its slant is significantly misleading. The reason why I’m not a faculty member isn’t that I couldn’t get a faculty job, as the article might lead you to suppose, but that I decided I didn’t want one. At the time I decided, I’d done one interview for an ass. prof. job (at North Carolina State) and scheduled another one (at Florida State). I have a more than respectable list of well cited publications in reputable journals (e.g., I’ve published in Evolution, Nature Genetics, and PNAS, and a couple of my first-author publications have been cited over a hundred times). Certainly, if I’d persevered, I could have gotten a job. I didn’t, because I think being a professor is generally not a great gig anymore and particularly not for me, for reasons explained in the Q & A section of my CV. Much the same goes for Jon Wilkins, the founder of the Ronin Institute, who wrote in a post on the institute’s blog, “If you come back and check up on me five or ten years from now, and you find me in a tenured faculty position, it will mean that I have failed (or maybe that I suffered a personality-altering head injury).”

The very title of the article, “Home for wayward academics,” insinuates a presumption the Ronin Institute opposes, the presumption that for scholars, being an academic is normative, and anything else is inferior. I, Jon, and probably many others who are or will be affiliated with the Ronin Institute aren’t “wayward academics,” we’re independent scholars, and we like it that way.

Enough with the “passion” already!

I recently attended an event that shall remain nameless, where representatives of a company that shall remain nameless proclaimed that they seek employees who are “passionate” and showed a video featuring employees affirming that they are indeed “passionate.” This company is in the business of analyzing the financial condition of other, privately held companies on behalf of prospective buyers of or investors in said companies.

Perhaps I lack imagination, but I find it impossible to imagine being passionate about that business. About the money to be made from it, maybe - some people’s love of money does seem passionate - but about the business in itself, hardly. Claiming to be “passionate” about something so mundane is a debasement of language, and demanding “passionate” employees is an invitation to dissemble, which is poor form for any company but especially for one whose business presumably involves auditing.

This was a particularly egregious case, but I’ve heard this kind of spiel so often that it’s like a repetitive-motion injury to the mind. Enough with the “passion” already! People take jobs and even start companies mainly because they need money, and given the political economy we inhabit, there’s nothing shameful about this. The work may be agreeable, occasionally even exhilarating, and it may well be beneficial to society. To the extent one has choices, it’s wise to choose with a view toward these qualities. But passion? My dictionary defines it as “strong and barely controllable emotion.” So, I’m passionate about the woman who has been my friend and lover for the past 12 years. I’m also a peculiar, cerebral person who’s intermittently passionate about certain ideas. And I’m something like passionate about some landscapes and biomes of the American southwest. That’s about it, and that’s just fine. If I had employees, as I may eventually, I’d expect them to work skillfully, diligently, and considerately, as I do myself. Passion, however, is for more important things.

Vol spécial

I just watched the most powerful film I’ve seen at the Full Frame festival (http://bit.ly/qgMEfi), Vol Spécial (Special Flight):

http://www.volspecial.ch/en/

It’s about illegal aliens held prisoner in Geneva. In most cases, their requests for asylum are rejected, and they are deported from Switzerland. Some have lived in Switzerland for many years and have wives (the prison is for men) and children from whom they’re being forcibly separated. Many are from Africa. The film is an astonishingly intimate look at the operation of the prison and the lives of its inmates.

It isn’t a pretty picture. On one hand, the inmates are treated decently in most quotidian respects, at least by American standards - thugs like Joe Arpaio don’t get to run prisons in Switzerland. On the other hand, there’s a hard core of arbitrariness, dehumanization, and injustice to the whole situation, and the efforts of the jailers to pretend otherwise are strained, to say the least. Presumably, it’s because the jailers are in denial of their complicity in injustice that they were so silly as to cooperate with the filmmakers. For example, there’s a stunning scene where a policeman is calmly explaining to an inmate how his flight “home” will proceed. The inmate protests that what is being done to him is inhumane and challenges the policeman to consider how he would feel if their positions were reversed. The policeman’s defense boils down to, mine is not to question the ways of the almighty immigration authorities. If I had been the inmate, I would have replied, “Ah, I see, you’re just following orders - like Eichmann.” And although the treatment of the deportees by the police isn’t Nazi-grade savage, they do, incredibly, manage to kill some of them, including a man we meet in the film prior to his deportation. The film includes a Swiss TV report on the incident - in Switzerland, it’s considered important news when an illegal alien dies in police custody.

The film touches but doesn’t pursue the issue of the extent to which decisions about who gets to stay and who has to leave are driven by bigotry or geopolitics. I’d guess much less so in Switzerland than in the United States, but I don’t really know. Whatever the drivers, there’s no denying the misery of the people who have to leave, many of whom in Vol Spécial are conspicuously articulate, industrious, and sociable - people a sensible nation would welcome.

UPDATE: At the Full Frame awards BBQ today, Vol Spécial received two awards. They’re well deserved; it’s really terrific.

The screening last night is the only screening I’ve ever attended at a Full Frame festival that didn’t end with applause. I don’t think it’s because the audience wasn’t impressed. Watching Vol Spécial is an overwhelming experience.

Samsara

At Durham’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (http://bit.ly/qgMEfi), I just watched Samsara:

http://www.barakasamsara.com/

Samsara is a Sanskrit word meaning something like “the cycle of death and rebirth to which life in the material world is bound,” and the film is as sprawling, even grandiose, as that definition suggests. It’s a procession of striking images from around the world, presented without explanation. And all those images were shot in sumptuous 70 mm Panavision, like “Lawrence of Arabia” and other mid-twentieth century spectaculars.

If you’ve ever seen Koyaanisqatsi (http://bit.ly/2Ui0HO), Samsara would bring it to mind; parts of Samsara are Koyaanisqatsi redux, for example, sped-up images of rivers of traffic gushing through Los Angeles at night. However, Samsara includes more intimate images too: children being baptized in Brazil, gaudy, fantastical coffins from Ghana, Buddhist monks first creating, then destroying an intricate mandala of colored sand, and on and on and on.

Besides the general theme of death and rebirth, there’s less-abstract thematic coherence in fits and starts, for example, a sequence that begins with an army of Chinese workers making electric irons in a cavernous factory and ends with a warehouse full of discarded electronic devices being gutted, with still-valuable parts set aside and the rest tossed into a giant crushing machine.

I doubt the filmmakers intended it, but what struck me wasn’t so much the inevitability of death and rebirth as the patchiness of cooperation among humans. We manage to cooperate in fits and starts, like those Chinese workers or a courtyard full of Filipino prisoners doing a remarkably elaborate aerobics routine or a multitude of pilgrims to Mecca bowing down in unison, but it rarely spreads far or lasts long. The film shows heavily militarized borders in Korea and Israel, both a middle-class American family and African tribesmen with painted faces grimly clutching their guns, and mind-boggling juxtapositions of wealth and poverty in several locales. It also shows eerily deserted neighborhoods full of wreckage in New Orleans after Katrina, likewise deserted ruins of the Khmer Empire, and the dismal town that stands today beside the Giza pyramids, monumental cooperative projects of a culture long dead. To say the least, we humans could stand to get a whole lot better at cooperating less parochially and sporadically. With over seven billion people on the planet, any hope of a decent future probably demands it.

Metamorphs: Artists spin science

Tonya Severson and I attended an event tonight in Chapel HIll featuring talks by several artists whose work is strongly inspired by and even interwoven with science, particularly biology:

http://art.unc.edu/News_Events/Events/CCM3_035907

I was especially impressed and delighted by the work, both artistic and scientific, of Brandon Ballengée:

http://www.brandonballengee.com/

Ballengée has helped elucidate the epidemic of frogs and toads with missing or extra hind legs, of which he has made some arresting images. For example:

He’s also enlisted a remarkable amount of public participation in his research, leading field trips and setting up laboratories in public spaces. It isn’t the kind of thing that tends to get you hired or promoted in academia, but I’d love to see more of it.

For inviting us, thanks to our friend Courtney Fitzpatrick, who was a panelist at this event and is herself an artist and scientist:

http://horseandbuggypress.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/maji-moto-%E2%80%94-new-fine-press-book-project-underway/

Strange beauties on the screen in Durham

I spent my evening at the opening session of Durham’s third annual Strange Beauty Film Festival:

http://strangebeauty.org/

There were 14 films of various lengths from various places, and yes, all were strange and most were beautiful.

My single favorite was Kudzu Vine by Josh Gibson of Durham:

You can watch a clip at http://bit.ly/yeFpjC. It’s a handcrafted, luminous ode to The Vine That Ate The South. It ends with us listening to an old-timey radio host extol the virtues of kudzu, its industriousness, perseverance, etc. Meanwhile, a rising tide of kudzu growing in time-lapse photography threatens to engulf the radio and the house containing it. (For my friends Ann and Chad, who raise goats: yes, there’s footage of goats happily munching kudzu leaves.)

The strangest beauty of the bunch, I think, was Pennipotens by Heather Freeman of Charlotte:

You can watch the whole thing at http://dai.ly/zfWVkW. It’s a twisted fairy tale rendered in dream-like animation, water-colorey and light-soaked yet creepy, a little reminiscent of Coraline. I’m not familiar with the old Flemish story on which it’s based, but it strikes me as something Uncles Sigmund and Carl would have found sehr interessant.

Altogether, another brilliant night out in Durham.

Sleazy with a chance of evil

A friend just pointed me (via Facebook, for fans of irony) to a piece about nefarious things Facebook and others do with what they know about you:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/How-Facebook-uses-your-data/articleshow/11775188.cms

(Speaking of irony, if you follow the link, you may be greeted with, “Please click on the Facebook connect button to auto log in to Times of India.”) The piece is a tad alarmist but essentially correct. So, why am I still using Facebook?

From my perspective, Facebook, Google, et al. are sleazy but not exactly worrisome, at least not yet. Do they use what they know about me to target ads at me? Sure. Do I pay the slightest attention to said ads? No; I turned my back on almost all advertising years ago (naturally, I run AdBlock in my browsers). Do they “share” what they know about me with America’s burgeoning police state? Probably. Do I care? Not very much. My political opinions are as evident on this blog as in my Facebook posts and comments, and none of them are illegal…yet. So, sleazy but not exactly worrisome: that’s why I’m still using Facebook.

However, merely sleazy doesn’t mean unobjectionable. Moreover, I’m well aware some other people are more vulnerable than I am. If a less sleazy alternative with something like Facebook’s functionality appears, I’ll go there.

Meanwhile, I’ve started developing a system with a bit of Facebook’s functionality that will be not sleazy at all. It’s more about connections between people and organizations they like than about connections between people and people they like, so it won’t be a Facebook substitute, but it will embody a very different set of ideas about and attitudes toward doing business with people’s tastes than Facebook, Google, et al. embody. (For those who know what I’ve been doing for the past several years, it’s what would happen if iFavr and CardVine got together and made a baby.)

UPDATE: Apropos the above, an interesting piece appeared yesterday,

http://lifehacker.com/5882865/how-paranoid-should-i-be-about-trusting-companies-with-my-data

and another one today:

http://gigaom.com/2012/02/08/lessons-from-path-and-pinterest-tell-users-everything/

The first is practical advice, and the second is about how two current darlings of the industry have gotten themselves in trouble through “decisions that put their interests ahead of their users and a lack of disclosure about what was going on behind the scenes or under the hood of their services.”

The things Path and Pinterest did strike me as typical of the raise-money-and-grab-eyeballs style of software startups they are. I would never even consider doing such things with CardVine or anything else I built, not only because I find them icky but also because it’s obvious to me they’re bad for business - users will find out, and they will be angry. This is part of what I’ve been trying to say as I’ve told various people that after spending much of last year in Silicon Valley, it’s clear to me I don’t fit in there. I’m beginning to think maybe I and some other like-minded entrepreneurs should get together and write a sort of manifesto about how to do privacy right, to counter the sleaziness of Facebook, Google, Path, Pinterest, and a few thousand other companies. Contrary to what one often hears in Silicon Valley, privacy isn’t dead or impractical, it just doesn’t go well with the business models of many companies.

Regrets of the dying (and some of the living)

The Guardian has published the “top five regrets of the dying”:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying

I find it striking all five are wishes “I” had done differently. I realize these are indeed choices many people make poorly (e.g., ubiquitous among males was “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard”). Yet so much of the pain in our lives comes from choices other people make without our consent or even awareness. My own greatest regret at this point is that it took me so long to see through the many falsehoods and distortions I was led to believe as a child; I spent my twenties trying to figure out what I could salvage from the wreckage - in the end, not much - and it took most of my thirties to get to the bottom of things, in so far as I have. And all of us are prisoners of our era, with its particular institutionalized follies and tragedies. Why, after all, do so many work so hard when the planet’s resources and humanity’s technologies are sufficient to furnish a decent standard of living for all?

Spoken like a true chowhound!

Awhile back, Tonya gave me a book called Are you really going to eat that? by Robb Walsh (http://bit.ly/A02bv3), which I’m finally reading and thoroughly enjoying. It’s a collection of short essays Walsh wrote over about a decade for various magazines and newspapers. They’re all about food, from conger-eel chowder in Chile to durian in Thailand to poulet de Bresse in France. A good many are set in Texas, where Walsh reviewed restaurants for newspapers in Austin and Houston.

Much of what I enjoy about Walsh’s writing is that, like me (and Tonya), he’s what I call a chowhound rather than a gourmet. Walsh doesn’t use these terms, but I’ve never seen the distinction expressed better than in his chapter titled “Folk art on bread.” It’s nominally a review of a Houston joint called Original New Orleans Po-Boys, whose oyster poor boy Walsh found superb. Sadly, the place closed a few years ago, but here’s the sign:

Walsh discovered that his review wasn’t the first coverage of Original New Orleans Po-Boys in The Houston Press:

In a framed review that appeared in this paper, Brad Tyer tells us that Antone’s defines the “state-of-the-art” in Houston poor boys, while Original New Orleans Po’Boy is a “low-brow variant.” I am puzzled and vaguely insulted - a lowbrow variant? Of a poor boy?

After discussing the history of the poor boy, both the sandwich and its name, Walsh continues:

The other day, I asked Tyer what he was thinking when he wrote the review. I particularly wondered why he didn’t mention the oyster poor boy. He said he didn’t sample the sandwich because he doesn’t like oysters. He also said he was just filling in as a restaurant writer and felt the need to apologize for his plebeian tastes. Like many people, he assumed that food critics generally focus on fancy restaurants. I explained my own philosophy to him.

A couple of weeks ago I went to hear the Houston Symphony perform a fascinating program of Beethoven works…A couple of weeks before that, I went to Miss Ann’s Playpen in the Third Ward for its Monday-night blues jam. I had a great time at both places, and I don’t see anything inconsistent about that.

In music, as in food, there is high art and there is folk art. Like many people, I enjoy both. But the fact is, in Texas, we are better known for the latter. We are far more famous for the blues than for classical music. Likewise, we are better known for barbecue than fine dining…

When food writers and chefs from New York, California, and Europe visit Houston, they want me to take them to smoky meat markets for brisket or Tex-Mex temples for enchiladas or soul-food joints for Southern breakfasts. It’s not that we’re bereft of brilliant chefs and great restaurants. We have plenty, but so does every other city. Chefs come and go, but classic peasant dishes are forever.

Well, maybe not quite forever, but a dish like pork chile verde, as magnificently rendered hereabouts by Fiesta Grill (http://bit.ly/Jffyr), does have considerable staying power. Walsh concludes:

You can’t compare a gritty poor boy shop to the fanciest restaurant in town. But you can judge both on how well they accomplish what they set out to do. And with its rendition of the folk art form known as the oyster poor boy, the humble dive called Original New Orleans Po’Boy approaches greatness.